Apartheid's Insanity and Stupidity

By Mateu Nonyane

The reader will find the book revealing with sporadic tragedy and humor. It is based on the author’s upbringing by struggling parents with many children. Working as a journalist on various English-language newspapers was equally dangerous. Many of his colleagues were detained and tortured by the South African government for exposing the country’s injustices to the outside world during student protests against apartheid, laws that separated citizens on the basis of race, skin color, ethnicity, and designated living areas under the Group Areas Act.

The author was forced to flee the country after he realized he had taken a big risk by allowing student leaders to hold nightly political meetings in his Soweto house while government Security Branch policemen were on the prowl. He could not imagine himself giving evidence for the State against his detained colleagues. That was one of the reasons he left the country and began life as a refugee, away from his wife and seven-year-old daughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662431234

Book preview

Chapter 1

Growing up in Alexandra Township, fifteen miles northeast of Johannesburg, was quite a rough journey interspersed with a maze of social, economic, and political twists I found hard to understand until I reached maturity with the passage of time.

My younger brother, David, and I lived with our parents in a single room that simultaneously was a kitchen and a bedroom, separated or partitioned by a sagging opaque drape. What rattled me to the core was watching a frail-looking man tie a baby’s white coffin to the back carrier of his two-wheeled bicycle, before saddened onlookers gathered in a courtyard a few houses away.

My parents were away that particular weekend when he slowly, carefully stepped on the pedals and began heading to the cemetery in his makeshift hearse after the infant’s coffin had been secured with strings to ensure it did not slide and fall off while in transit. He cycled across and beyond the winding Jukskei River, notorious for floating murder victim bodies and dead animals.

It was crushing poverty and indigence to witness an unusual spectacle of that kind, and it was still daylight when he returned a few hours later, looking extremely drawn and haggard. He no longer was riding the bike. He was pushing and side-dragging it by the handles instead. To onlookers, who did not go away, it was not surprising. The burden of filling the infant’s grave all by himself was labor-intensive and had taken a heavy toll on him.

He could have been the infant’s father or relative; no one could certainly tell. All that immediate neighbors knew was the bereaved family’s extreme poverty. It could not afford a normal burial that demanded a slaughtered animal at home or acquire the services of a lay preacher and buy flowers, in spite of concerned neighbors’ rallies to raise just about enough funds to cover funeral expenses earlier in the week.

I was about ten years old, and parents had warned every child in the neighborhood to refrain from taking a peek at funeral processions or covered corpses lying in the streets before they were carried away. Parents were not trained psychologists, not even by a long shot, yet they strongly believed such exposures were foreboding.

I went to bed that evening downhearted and depressed to the extent that my studies as an elementary student at Ikage Central Junior School were adversely affected. Teachers immediately noticed my sudden lack of concentration and did not understand why. My parents, too, observed the sudden, aberrant behavior uncharacteristic of a son they thought was a good boy. They asked what my problem was. I responded I did not know because telling them the truth could have landed me in serious trouble, severe punishment I would not forget even if I lived to be a century old.

Passing time, however, dictated a gradual recovery to some semblance of normal behavior after being plagued by incessant nightmares. Conjured images of the poor man and his makeshift hearse kept coming back and could not be shrugged off. It was not until I graduated to my later teens that I began to realize Africans were unwillingly relegated or subjected to the bottom of the economic ladder by virtue of skin color in a land our ancestors possessed for centuries until they were vanquished. It was, therefore, quite explanatory why it was not out of choice for the grieving family to be in that situation. I would sit back and cogitate, Why? But why? It soon dawned the country’s laws the ruling Nationalist Party promulgated separated its citizens on the basis of skin color, race, ethnicity, and domicile. I was not aghast when the ruling regime was, at one stage, branded a skunk among civilized nations. Africans, in particular, endured the harshest treatment of any group. Jesus Christ could have wept.

It also did not faze me when one teacher told a group of students in class a sardonic joke. He said South Africa was the only country on the face of planet Earth whose citizens were constantly reminded by the ruling white minority regime never to hate together, but apart. Hence the obnoxious noun apartheid, pronounced the Afrikaner way. It still resonates like sudden tornado.

Seventeenth Avenue at the time was sadly shortened by the Jukskei River, which prevented construction of more houses for African landlords, who rented out rooms as it was more lucrative. Alexandra Township, with an estimated population of one thousand, was commonly known as Dark City because it was without electricity. Consequently, families relied on lanterns, kerosene-burning lamps, and candles for lighting. Primus stoves and braziers performed other utilitarian purposes: boiling water for clothes’ washing, cooking, and the roasting of shelled peanuts and fresh corn.

The brazier was a bucket made of fortified sheet metal, holes drilled all over to enable natural air to permeate through if wood and coal were to burn quicker. On its top lay an overlapping iron grill that was a platform for supporting cooking utensils like frying pans, regular pots, and three-legged cast-iron pots. A highly flammable purple liquid, benzene, usually used for cleaning men’s suits and women’s costumes was, at times, splashed in to quicken the burning process. The same thing with kerosene, commonly known as paraffin in South Africa. Store owners kept it in ten-gallon drums, from which they pumped or siphoned the product into sheet metal gallon containers ready for purchase.

As much as braziers played a pivotal role for families’ continued sustenance, they also posed great dangers in the winter. In most cases, houses lacked ceilings and insulated walls, and residents were tempted to bring them inside to keep warm before bedtime, completely oblivious to emitted light-blue coal flames. This practice frequently resulted in fatalities caused by the silent killer, carbon monoxide poisoning, compounded by poor ventilation. The so-called ventilators were nothing less than gaping brick holes usually kept sealed with old newspapers and plastic material to stave off the cold. Sheet metal roofing also exacerbated the misery. They readily conducted heat or cold, depending on weather conditions.

Brick-built toilets were further away to help ward off pungent odor from buckets containing human waste, a euphemism for urine and feces. A dangerous, cancer-causing white chemical agent, DDT, was used for cleaning floors and toilet seats. It also was thrown undiluted into buckets to minimize the smell while families slept with bedpans tucked nearby lest they were ambushed by nature’s call.

At the back of each toilet was a pivoting rectangular flap through which human waste buckets were removed each evening except weekends. Men removing the human waste urbanites shunned were migrant workers whom municipalities recruited from drought-stricken rural areas, where viable or gainful employment opportunities were nonexistent. They wore shin-high rubber boots, pants tucked inside these for protection from splashing waste. They lived in fenced-in males-only hostels that did not allow female visitors.

I do not remember seeing any wear gloves as they moved from household to household, dumping the waste into tractor-driven tanks. They kept faces covered with long cloths fastened by knots at the nape. Mischievous neighborhood teenagers often taunted them, ran away, and hid. But one was so stupid he ran to where he lived in full view of an angry remover, who kept an eye on him. The next thing he did was dump a full, smelly load of the waste right on the doorsteps and left the emptied bucket there. The taunting stopped right there after word spread of what happened the evening before.

Dark City was fairly huge and was seen as a melting-pot with various ethnic groups. There was only one clinic and a few ambulances, including a resettlement tuberculosis building near the fringes of Jukskei River on the east side. First and Second Avenues were always abuzz with merchants in all hues: Chinese, Japanese, and Africans. One of the Africans was Simon Ngatane, a well-known boxing promoter who imported overseas professional fighters for a series of engagements. Uncle Sy, as he was affectionately called, also owned and operated a printing shop that enhanced his venture with billboards and flyers, besides printing customer business cards and invoices.

Africans generally looked at the Chinese and Japanese as natural allies because the apartheid regime also classified them nonwhites, and like Africans, they could not vote. Coal merchants, however, thrived better financially because of the ongoing demand for the product that had become indispensable as a main source of energy other than firewood. But a bus company, Public Utility Transport Corporation (PUTCO), made the most money and always ranked on top of the list. It was the only entity that continued to enjoy exclusive monopoly as the mode of transportation carrying commuters to and from work, besides taxicabs.

It had the habit of arbitrarily increasing fares without informing its passengers, who felt insulted and believed the bus company took them for granted. Infuriated, they staged mass boycotts initiated by Phineas Madzunya, African National Congress’s outspoken activist. Many stayed home while others went to work by taxicabs and bicycles. Meanwhile PUTCO’s fleet of buses remained idle at its main depot outside First Avenue. The company was forced to give in and reversed its decision to increase fares, realizing the profit margin was shrinking as the boycott went on for weeks.

Unfortunately, scores of Africans were mortally wounded and hundreds seriously wounded by police machine-gun fire as they were returning home one evening. We lived on Third Avenue before moving to Seventeenth Avenue when that happened. I remember my parents shouting in hushed tones, ordering David and me to lie flat on the floor and away from the windows just in case stray bullets whizzed by. We could hear running machine-gun fire in the dead of night. Residents woke up the next morning to a gory sight of corpses lying in the streets while government hearses carried them to morgues in shuttles. These vehicles were painted black and were commonly known as Black Marias. I could not understand Maria’s association with that color, especially since Maria, or Mary in English, was Jesus Christ’s mother. It should be on record that black policemen were prohibited by law from carrying service revolvers, as opposed to their white counterparts. Their uniform also was different, khaki.

In the meantime, the regime was cleverly calculating as to what to do with Madzunya, a constant thorn to its flesh. It finally found an excuse by deporting him to his native Plumtree, Rhodesia, about twenty years after the bus boycott. He was forced to leave his wife and children behind. I interviewed him through an open train window as he sat forlorn in a third-class train compartment at Johannesburg Park Station in 1967. He did not say much. He was in a pensive and contemplative mood instead. Nobody was there to wave him farewell as the diesel-powered train pulled away and disappeared. I remember that year as clearly as if it were yesterday because it was the same year I began working as a permanent cub reporter for the World, a daily newspaper with an exclusive black readership.

Dark City residents still faced problems even long before Madzunya was deported. The sudden emergence of fierce rival gangs, Spoilers and Msomi, was the problem. They turned the township upside-down and virtually reduced it into a battlefield with running gunfire. It would have made sense if they were settling scores between themselves, but they indiscriminately released firepower and fatally wounded innocent bystanders, some of whom were returning or going to work. It turned out the gangs acquired guns from some white policemen attached to Wynberg Police Station that had courts as well.

Robbing, maiming, and extorting money from landlords and store owners was daily fodder. Passengers, bus, and taxicab drivers were also subjected to that kind of crime wave for almost five years without police doing anything to quell the carnage. At the helm of Msomi was Shadrack Matthews, a Rhodesian-born African, and his second-in-command, compatriot Lefty Tembo, while Alec Badman Sibisi, a South African–born black man from Charterston,